The Mask Comes Off Anthony Fauci's Pandemic Response

Greg Nash/Pool via AP

So much to be outraged about, so little time. You would have thought that we're still close enough on the historical timeline to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially here in the United States, that the news from Friday would have resulted in atomic-level public reaction. 

Due to the other outrage, the banana republic court verdict in lower Manhattan that was micromanaged and orchestrated by Joe Biden donor and trial judge Juan Merchan, the news about the pandemic culpability of Dr. Anthony Fauci barely registered a blip. 

The top medical advisor in the White House in 2019-2023 at the height of the COVID outbreak, Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified in January in a closed-door session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The transcript of that hearing was released last Friday. 

In short, the response to the pandemic - the masks, the social distancing, the separation of families, the 6-foot spacing signs graffitied all across the country, the plexiglass walls erected to wall people off from each other, the closed schools, all of it was bovine excrement. All of it. There wasn't a lick of science behind any of the policy. It was Anthony Fauci and his team making it up as they went along, and Fauci relishing the power trip in which he found himself. 

In the National Review's write-up of the release of the transcript, here is Dr. Fauci just nonchalantly admitting that masking, in this case, child masking that caused so much damage to an entire generation of child development, wasn't based in any scientific data. Fauci said this. 

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During the second day of his testimony, Fauci made a similar concession about the lack of scientific evidence to support masking children to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

“Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children?” a staffer asked Fauci.

“You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have,” Fauci replied.

Keep in mind, this was Anthony Fauci on 60 Minutes before the pandemic really took hold, on the efficaciousness of masking. 

It turned into masking, double masking, masking alone indoors, masking alone in your car, masking children as young as two-years old, and this policy lasted for over two years

On social distancing, here's the part of the transcript that the Washington Post reports

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.” 

Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation, according to a transcript released in May.

 Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.

My step-son was a freshman in high school in 2020 when the pandemic arrived. One of the last school functions he was able to participate in was the Chinese New Year Parade in downtown San Francisco. He played trumpet in marching band, and in the back of our minds, we knew this flu thing was out there and just starting to pop up in the States in Early February, but we went on the trip anyway. The crowd was one-third its normal size, and little did we know what was about to happen. School was shut down a few weeks later and moved to remote learning for the rest of the school year, and for the first half of his sophomore year.

When school did reopen to in-class learning, double masking was strongly recommended, and band, of any kind, was not immediately available. After a period of time, and a lot of negotiation and wrangling between the band director, the school district, and county, state and federal officials, the band was eventually allowed to play under the following conditions: students could not play music together indoors. It could only be performed outdoors, with 12-foot spacing between students/instruments. All bell instruments (horns), had to have elastic cloth screens over the bells to prevent COVID flying out in B-flat.

Musicians had to wear masks over their nose and mouth until the last second before they had to play. Then, they could pull down the mask, play their part, and immediately mask back up. Some students had masks that had slits cut out of the mouth where the instrument's mouthpiece could fit through. All this was strictly enforced, or else risking the shutting down of the whole program. And thanks to the testimony of Dr. Fauci, the house of cards was shown that all of this guidance was issued by a whole bunch of bureaucrats at all levels of government who had no science, no data, nothing at all to back up the policy. They were winging it. 

Have you ever heard a band try to play as a unit spaced out twelve feet apart from the opposite end of the stadium a hundred yards away? I have. It sounds a little thin. The restrictions and headaches suffered just in order to let kids play music was so onerous, it drove our high school's band director into early retirement in 2021. 

As late as April of 2022, Fauci was still on television threatening to put the masks back on.



Again, there was still no scientific data that warranted the fearmongering by Fauci. 

The vaccines came up, too, in the January transcript. Full disclosure: I had COVID twice. Took Ivermectin both times, immediately recovered. I did have the initial two-dose vaccine afterwards, and one booster. I've had no ill effects, and will not weigh in on the controversy around the vaccines, or alternative treatment regimens, here. I am not hostile to the vaccines, nor am I hostile to any treatment that works against the virus. But here is what Dr. Fauci said about the vaccines from the House Select Committee's transcript release:

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VACCINE MANDATES: Dr. Fauci admitted that vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future. He also claimed that these mandates were not sufficiently studied ahead of the pandemic. Previously, Dr. Fauci advocated “that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.”

Majority Counsel: “Do you think mandating vaccines can result in some hesitancy?”

Dr. Fauci: “I think one of the things that we really need to do after the fact, now, to — you know, after-the-game, after-the-event evaluation of things that need to be done, we really need to take a look at the psyche of the country, have maybe some social-type studies to figure out, does the mandating of vaccines in the way the country’s mental framework is right now, does that actually cause more people to not want to get vaccinated, or not? I don’t know. But I think that’s something we need to know.”

You want to fly around the country, Fauci asks, you have to get vaccinated. His rules. 


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From denying the lab leak theory as conspiracy fodder for the length of his stay in government managing the pandemic to quietly acknowledging under oath the lab leak theory is plausible and not a conspiracy theory after all, to employing the Bill Clinton semantic "it depends upon the definition of the word is" tactic regarding gain of function research, and peppering his entire testimony with the Hillary Clinton "I don't recall" mantra, it's infuriating when you look at the damage one person wrought across the entire globe. 

As of April, 2024, over seven million people have died from COVID. Are every one of those deaths laid at the feet of Anthony Fauci? Of course, not. But a whole bunch of them are, because at the height of his reign, and during COVID, he ruled policy with an iron fist, Fauci's word was not just accepted internationally as the gospel truth, it was regarded as science itself. 




Of course, we now know, and Fauci just confirmed, that he was making science up. At what cost? Well, child speech development, for starters

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In a report from 2022, two years after the start of the pandemic, 95 percent of health visitors reported that the pandemic was having an ongoing negative impact on children’s communication, speech, and language skills. Indeed, children born in the first three months of the pandemic met fewer communication developmental milestones compared to those born pre-pandemic. When these children were 1 year old, only 77 percent could express one definite and meaningful word, compared to 98 percent of pre-pandemic babies. Similar differences were observed for other important language milestones such as pointing and waving goodbye.

Remember being separated from your family members, especially grandparents from their grandkids? 

Remember not being allowed to hold funeral services, because you couldn't congregate in groups? And if you did, and felt the need to comfort someone in mourning, stuff like this happened? 

Remember how many people died in the hospital alone, because no visitors were allowed in to keep the COVID from spreading? 

Remember the trillions of dollars this economy lost, all the businesses that didn't survive the shutdown, the job losses, the inflation as a result of over-stimulating an economy that never should have been shut down in the first place? That's all Mr. Science, Anthony Fauci. 

Dr. Fauci is supposed to testify in an open hearing in front of House Oversight, and is expected to have to answer for newly-discovered emails from an aide that possibly implicate Fauci's culpability in helping to fund the origin of the virus as part of NIAID's gain of function research grant program. 

In a just world, the House Republicans would bring in Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and use him as their lead counsel, ceding him the time to just have at it with Fauci once and for all.

There are lots of rotten people in government, both present and recently-retired. Joe Biden certainly ranks up there. John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Alejandro Mayorkas, Jennifer Granholm, Merrick Garland, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Adam Schiff would make a pretty good top ten of bad people. Note that I do not include Kamala Harris in this list, due to the fact that I believe she would head up an entirely different list of morons in government, which are wholly different than rotten.

But don't overlook Dr. Fauci on the rotten list. He's easily top five. After what we read from his testimony back in January, he probably makes the top three. After today's hearing, we'll have to revisit his ranking. 

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